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Ancient and Colonial Zapotec and Mixtec Calendars: A Revisionist View*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Howard F. Cline  and
Mary W. Cline
Howard F. Cline
Affiliation:
Arlington, Virginia
Mary W. Cline
Affiliation:
Arlington, Virginia
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Extract

In 1966 José Alcina Franch published preliminary descriptions of a remarkable group of 29 Zapotec colonial calendars in the Archives of the Indies. As colonial material on Zapotec calendars has been nearly non-existent, this find is very important. Alcina Franch illustrated some folios and discussed the solar tropical year which Calendar 21 provides. He noted the provisional nature of his findings, and indicated that fuller publication would follow after further study. So far as the writer is aware this more definitive publication has not appeared.

Using techniques and approaches he developed in the course of a long and detailed comparative study of ancient and colonial Mesoamerican chronologies and calendars now nearly completed, the writer will extract further information from the material partially published by Alcina Franch.3 His data, even in their incomplete form, can be made to yield several significant results under such analysis, especially when the Zapotec is related to what is known about Mixtec calendrics. In the early stages the two cultures were nearly undifferentiated, and in ancient and colonial days shared a common tonalpohualli.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , January 1975 , pp. 272 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1975

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Footnotes

*

This is a posthumous study. For this reason the format has been preserved as in the original. A companion study “The Chronology of the Conquest: Synchronologies in Codex Telleriano Remensis and Sahagún,” is being published in the Journal of the Society of Americanists (Paris) in its issue of October, 1974.

References

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